OMS Lecture: Prof. Ardis Butterfield (Yale), ‘Do We Mean Lyric or Song?’

When: Monday 31 October, 5.15pm

Where: Lecture Theatre 2, English Faculty (St Cross Building)

What: Michaelmas Medieval Studies Lecture by Professor Ardis Butterfield (Yale University) as Astor Visiting Lecturer

Ardis Butterfield is Marie Boroff Professor of English and (by courtesy) Professor of French and Music at Yale University. Her many published works investigate medieval literature and music across languages and national boundaries. Her books include Poetry and Music in Medieval France, and The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language and the Nation in the Hundred Years War. She is currently completing a major new edition of medieval English lyrics.

Do we mean lyric or song? Modern lyric theory in history

 Is ‘lyric’ something that has always existed as a category of poetry or music, or has it been created through a process of study and academic debate from the nineteenth century onwards – a process that Virginia Jackson has called ‘lyricization’? If that’s the case, where does medieval lyric fit in?

This lecture argued that medieval lyric is not on the edge of that debate, but at its centre. It does this by investigating the missing ingredient in many literary discussions of lyrics: their music. Thinking about the music for medieval lyrics (which in so many cases has not survived) can have an impact on modern theoretical discussions of poetry, requiring all of us to rethink our categories and assumptions.

Featured manuscripts (in order of appearance):
Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson C. 670, f.148v
British Library, Harley MS 978, f.11v
British Library, Arundel MS 248, f.154r
Oxford, Bodleian Library, Douce 302, f.24r (John Audelay’s book)
Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, Advocates MS 18.7.21,ff. 116r-121v (John of Grimestone’s preaching book)

Professor Butterfield also gave a manuscripts masterclass in the Weston Library’s Sir Victor Blank Lecture Theatre, 2–4pm on Tuesday 1 November: ‘Manuscripts of medieval lyric and song in the Bodleian Library’

Trinity Term 2022 OMS Lecture: Caroline Danforth

Paper, Linen, Silk, and Parchment – Material Fragments from an Extinguished Convent

Tuesday 26 April 2022, 5p. Watch the recording on the OMS Youtube Channel

Apollonia von Freyberg was a Poor Clare nun living in the medieval village of Mülhausen (today, Mulhouse, France). We know of Apollonia through an artefact housed at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC – a colored woodcut by Lienhart Ysenhut (1959.16.15) which is housed inside a box made, in part, of recycled materials. Among these materials is the fragment of a letter addressed to Apollonia. Apollonia enriched her convent with manifold gifts and subsequently experienced the dissolution of her cloistered home during the Protestant Reformation. Beginning with Ysenhut’s print and the clues hidden in its enclosure, learn more about Apollonia’s family, wealth, and fate following her departure from Mülhausen in the early 16th century.

Caroline Danforth holds an MFA in painting from The George Washington University and a BA in German, Art History, and Fine Arts from Mary Washington College. She also studied art history in Germany for two years, in Munich and Tübingen. Since 2008, she has worked as a preservation framer of prints, drawings, and photographs at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Her research interests include the history and manufacture of parchment, German to English translation, and the Poor Clares of late medieval Germany. Most recently, Caroline served as guest editor for a special issue on parchment for Art in Translation and co-authored Letters for Apollonia for Franciscan Studies.

Lucy Pick

Lucy Pick in Oxford

Report on Lucy Pick’s Lecture for OMS: A Guest Blog by Pilar Bertuzzi Rivett

Watch Lucy Pick’s OMS Lecture 2022 here:

The Oxford Medieval Studies Lecture for Hilary Term 2022 was delivered on 8 February by Professor Lucy Pick, historian of medieval thought and culture, author of Her Father’s Daughter: Gender, Power, and Religion in Early the Spanish Kingdoms (Cornell 2017), Pilgrimage (Cuidono 2014) and Conflict and Coexistence: Archbishop Rodrigo and the Muslims and Jews of Thirteenth-Century Spain (University of Michigan 2004). Professor Pick is a visiting scholar at the Center for Hebrew and Jewish Studies in Oxford, researching the earliest Latin translation of Maimonides’ Guide to the Perplexed.

As a Hebraist and fellow historian of medieval thought, I looked forward to Professor Pick’s take on what Jewish-Christian relationships meant in the case of Maimonides’ Guide to the Perplexed. It is a treat to be able to read a Jewish Medieval author in Latin and since instances of actual intellectual cooperation (especially in the early Middle Ages, which is what I focus on) are very few and far between, I am always curious to learn about them. I was particularly interested in how Professor Pick discovered this cooperation and what method she was going to use in order to flesh it out.

I found that Professor Pick set the scene very aptly when she opened her presentation mentioning that the Guide to the Perplexed “landed in the Latin scholastic world of the thirteenth century like a stick of dynamite.” Maimonides’ synthesis of science, the Law, Greek physics and metaphysics through the lens of the Hebrew Bible was nothing short of “explosive”. He offered a method for assimilating and interpreting the new Aristotle that flooded the schools of the thirteenth century. Did he inspire part of that flood? Did the Guide open up new avenues of thought for Christian readers that could be used as tools in their polemics against the Jews? These were some of the questions that were addressed in her presentation.

In what to me was reminiscent of the Italian school of microhistory, Professor Pick set aside the Christian scholastics of the mid to late thirteenth century, (whose study “used up most of the scholarly oxygen dedicated to Maimonides Latinus”) to focus on a much earlier community of readers of the Guide, one composed of both Jewish and Christians in the city of Toledo. At the heart of her project is the Liber de Parabola (witnessed in only one manuscript, Paris Sorbonne MS 601), the earliest Latin translation of the Guide (Part III, chapters 29-49 in which Maimonides discusses the reasons for commandments). According to Professor Pick, the Liber has not received the attention it deserves, neither as a witness to the Guide nor for its additional content which bears witness to the earliest reception to the ideas of the Guide. She therefore traced these individuals’ contact with the Liber de Parabola to shed light on both positive and negative aspects of its reception by Christians.

The key characters in this “textual community” are Samuel ibn Tibbon, who translated Maimonides’ Guide from Judeo-Arabic into Hebrew; Michael Scot, court astrologer to Frederick II who began his career as a master in Toledo, translating scientific texts from Arabic into Latin and Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, Archbishop of Toledo, in whose cathedral Michael and Samuel may have met and in whose writings we can trace the earliest evidence of Maimonides’ impact on the Latin world.

Samuel’s contribution to the Liber is easiest to identify: he used his Hebrew translation for the base texts; he drew on his interpretation of Maimonides’ ideas about philosophical and Biblical exegesis and illustrated it with examples from his commentary on Ecclesiastics. He is cited by name at least six times in connection with the readings of the Hebrew Bible and interpretation of Jewish law. Pick believes that these passages reflect oral communication between Samuel Ibn Tabbon and the translator.

Michael Scot’s identity is more difficult to establish and rests on substantial circumstantial evidence. Michael Scot knew the work of Maimonides as he cited him in his “De physionomiae”; he was in Rome at the same time as the Liber de Parabola was dedicated to Cardinal Romanus and first appeared on the historical record in 1215 in Rome, accompanying the entourage of the Archbishop of Toledo at the Fourth Lateran Council. Pick notes that Samuel consulted books by Aristoteles meteorology (some of which Scot translated into Latin) in Toledo at some point between 1204 and 1210, thus Michael and Samuel could plausibly have met and worked together.

Pick also described how Michael Scot became a close associate of Jacob Anatoli while at Frederick II’s court in Naples. Anatoli was Samuel’s son in law, whose philosophical sermons (Malmad ha-Talmidim) recounted conversations with Michael Scot and his knowledge of Maimonides’ work. In one of his sermons on Parshat Nitzavim, Anatoli showed awareness of the Liber de Parabola, inclusive of its structure and introduction and associates it with Michael Scot. Pick very ably showed parallels between Anatoli’s interpretation of Deuteronomy 4:6 with the opening of the Liber de Parabola which contrasts the interpretation of a commandment with the allegory of a parable.    

By means of a venn diagram, Pick highlighted the interpenetration of ideas amongst the translators of key works in Toledo, Naples and Provence all of whom were engaged in a parallel set of translations and commentaries on Aristotle’s Meteorology inspired by Part II Chapter 30 of Maimonides’ Guide. Since Part II was not available in the Liber, this suggests a wider diffusion of the Guide in Toledo.  

The presentation concluded by showing the “polemical” potential to Christian borrowing of Maimonides’ ideas. The Archbishop of Toledo reacted to Part II Chapter 30 in his Breviarium in which he used Maimonides’ ideas of “principle” and “spirit” to argue for the Christian Trinity. This is an example of how the section of the Guide in the Liber de Parabola was used by later Christians in support of a doctrine of “supersession” rather than fostering a more positive understanding of those who follow God’s commandments, as Jacob Anatoli would have hoped for.

This conclusion was what surprised me most about the presentation. I suppose I approached the topic with the eyes of someone accustomed to the interpenetration of ideas between Christians and Jews of Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages when it comes to mysticism. However, Professor Pick’s paper showed that by the thirteenth century intellectual cooperation could be both a tool and a weapon. In her own words, “textual community did not mean safety and an exchange of texts could provide ammunition as well as understanding.” In the period of history I focus on, between the ninth and eleventh centuries, both Christian and Jewish polemical tools were still in their pre-scholastic phase; Peter Damian’s work only really impacted Jewish-Christian relations towards the end of my “horizon.” However, the fact that Dante Alighieri put Pater Damian in the highest circles of Paradise, whereas Michael Scot was relegated to the malebolgie of Hell should have alerted me to the fact that there was not going to be a “happy ending” to Professor Pick’s textual community.

Still, any kind of inter-faith intellectual cooperation in the Middle Ages is worth researching because it demystifies some of the myths that surround the history of Christian and Jewish communities. When genuine, as in the case of Pick’s “textual community” or in the case of the Victorines in Paris, cooperation challenges the narrative of Jews and Christians as distinct cultures in “conversation and conflict.” The key takeaway from this paper for my dissertation is that we are better served to approach the history of Jews and Christians in the Middle Ages from an organic model of culture rather than who influenced whom, to borrow from David Biale and Michael Satlow. I admire the way in which Pick focuses on people and their agency and how comfortable she was with admitting that sometimes, as in the case of Michael Scot’s identity, one has to rely on somewhat circumstantial evidence. As medievalists, we do not always find “the silver bullet”; we are dealing with people and sources that existed nearly two thousand years ago. Even the most refined sleuths sometimes build cases on indirect evidence. If we wanted simple, straightforward, direct evidence, we would be statisticians or, worse still, modern historians.

I found that the interdisciplinary, multi-lingual approach in Pick’s presentation fit very well with the remit of the OMS and with our own identity as medieval historians. In Professor Pick’s words, “life is best viewed through more than one window.”

Pick reminded the audience that.

“It has been corrected from my own book. I am Moses son of Rabbi Maimon, the Righteous, of Blessed Memory”
Egypt, 1170–80
Handwritten in ink on paper
Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, MS. Huntington 80

Museum in the Middle: medieval things in a (still) medieval university

OMS Trinity Term Lecture by Jim Harris (Ashmolean Museum)

Tuesday, 27 April 2021, 5-6pm BST, live streamed from the Ashmolean

The medieval collections of the Ashmolean Museum are rich in diversity and dazzling in quality, and using them in the service of the university curriculum has made it possible to explore the wide range of what we consider ‘medieval’ actually is.In this lecture, Teaching Curator Dr Jim Harris will discuss teaching with the Ashmolean’s medieval collections, asking questions not only about the objects themselves but about the extent to which they reveal the Museum itself to be as much a medieval construct as it is a so-called ‘product of the Enlightenment’.

Everybody welcome to join on youtube!
Image:  Travelling Games Board, Venice, 15th century; WA1964.14; Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.


Celebrating Nigel Palmer and Devotional Culture. A Report on the 2016 Medieval Studies Lecture

By Edmund Wareham

This year’s Medieval Studies lecture took on a slightly different form, as not just the annual celebration of the interdisciplinary study of medieval culture but also of Professor Nigel Palmer’s 70th birthday. It was therefore highly appropriate that Dr Stephen Mossman, who wrote his doctorate in the Oxford German sub-faculty but now lectures in the Manchester History department and who himself was a former pupil of Nigel, was able to deliver this year’s highly memorable and engaging lecture.

The focus of Stephen’s lecture was devotional culture in late medieval Strasbourg. The city presents a particular challenge for those attempting to reconstruct its literary, religious and cultural history because of the destruction of the town’s municipal library in its bombardment in the Franco-Prussian war. Stephen offered a number of possibilities of how this could nonetheless be possible, drawing on surviving archival sources, art and architecture from the city, even taking us inside a Strasbourg clothes shop where the back room houses a number of important wall paintings. He showed through an analysis of widely dispersed manuscripts how connections to Strasbourg could still be traced. He underlined the importance of the Alsatian city through the example of the Dutch mystic Jan van Ruusbroec, the transmission of whose works centred on Brabant but also Strasbourg, as religious and intellectual trends flowed up the Rhine, often directly.

A highlight of the lecture was undoubtedly the ‘great reveal’ of Nigel’s birthday present, a fifteenth century Carthusian manuscript in its original limp binding bought by the Bodleian library. This collection of devotional texts, focussed on the Passion (such as Bonaventure) and Carthusian spirituality (such as Adam of Dryburgh), contains a reference to a Strasbourg Carthusian famulus, a significant discovery given the particular transmission situation from the city. Thanks to references to the diocese of Trier in the binding material, Stephen suggested that the manuscript was produced in the Koblenz Charterhouse and made its way to Strasbourg. Nevertheless Monika Studer, in a colloquium the following day on German Manuscripts in Oxford, suggested through a comparison with a Basel manuscript from the Strasbourg Charterhouse, that the Oxford manuscript could in fact have been produced there. Nigel had no idea about the existence of the manuscript or that it had been purchased by the Bodleian: further research is now an exciting possibility.

The Strasbourg Charterhouse manuscript was one strand in Stephen’s lecture on the central importance of a new kind of domestic devotion within Strasbourg in the later Middle Ages. He showed how the division between cloister and world was less pronounced and more permeable than has previously been recognised. Institutions such as the Strasbourg Charterhouse and the Hospitaller commandery at the Grüner Wörth (founded 1367) were at the forefront of a new lay, devotional culture. These institutions, less connected to the town’s guilds but more with its citizenship, offered a particular blend of monastic and worldly devotion and offered a distinctive development from earlier forms of monastic, urban spirituality. Contemporary writers suggested that the decline of monasteries lay less in their separation from the world, but rather in the lack of lay oversight.

The developments in these institutions paralleled a rise of a new understanding of domesticity, emerging in the fourteenth century, in which qualities such as orderliness and privacy came more to the fore. An increased focus on interiority was not just evident in Flemish or Italian art, but was in evidence in Strasbourg as the domestic sphere became sacralised. Altar pieces such as the Meister des Paradiesgärtlein’s altar piece ‘Joseph’s Doubt’ (1430), were one such media in which this became clear and were part of a widespread phenomena in stained glass, tapestries and wall paintings. The domestic and the sacred had become merged. 

Following the talk, a drinks reception was held in the Taylor and the newly-acquired manuscript was on display (behind glass!). Strasbourg was then the focus of attention at the morning session the following day at a colloquium in the Weston Library on German manuscripts in Oxford. Former students, colleagues and friends of Nigel gave a number of short presentations on various manuscripts held in Oxford, including from the Taylorian and Merton College Library, and suggested various palaeographical, codicological and textual approaches to a diverse set of material ranging from a set of eighth century psalms to an early seventeenth century Yiddish songbook.

You can watch the lecture here.

Oxford, 22 November 2016
Edmund Wareham (Research Associate on the ‘Nuns’ Network’ Project) edmund.wareham@jesus.ox.ac.uk